Jeff Wilpon won't rest until Amazin' mission is complete

Saturday

Mar 29, 2008 at 2:00 AMMar 29, 2008 at 2:17 AM

It's five o'clock in the morning in Greenwich, Conn., the land of high net worth and billion-dollar hedge funds, and inside one of these tony, new-money homes, a creature of habit is already stirring — and beginning to sweat.

Michael P. Geffner

It's five o'clock in the morning in Greenwich, Conn., the land of high net worth and billion-dollar hedge funds, and inside one of these tony, new-money homes, a creature of habit is already stirring — and beginning to sweat.

Jeff Wilpon, 46, one of the most vilified New York City sports figures in recent years but who has more and more become the face of Mets' ownership, is pedaling furiously on his stationary bike, something he does for an hour every day.

It's said by those who know Wilpon best that from this point on he won't come to anything resembling a complete stop until, incredibly, around 10 at night, moving steadily throughout his day like some Pac-Man gobbling up everything in his path, seemingly checking off one item after the next — in exact order, no less — from a carefully-prepared, if not overly ambitious list.

Whether you view him as compulsive, or merely a man driven to succeed in his own image and not in the shadow of his successful father's, or just someone desperately looking to defy his critics, Wilpon is totally locked into daily ritual.

After his stint on the bike, he'll hit the computer and scan the net, Googling for everything related to the Mets that day, until exhausting his search to the point where he has nothing left to read anymore.

"He wants to know as much about everything as possible," said Dave Howard, the Mets' executive vice president of business operations. "He wants to download all the info and if there's a problem he wants to quickly figure out how to fix it."

Wilpon will eventually drop off his son and daughter at school, pick up his super-sized dose of caffeine — a black iced coffee with sugar — and head off to Shea, where, indulging in his odd childhood habit of nibbling, if not chipping away, on thawing-out frozen blueberries or raspberries, he'll all but gyrate into a blur of making phone calls, reading newspapers, poring over in-house reports, sending out e-mails and text messages, hosting meetings and conference calls, and for the last couple of years, topped with a hard-hat, fast-stepping it across the parking lot to oversee the construction of his nearly $800 million, state-of-the-art project, Citi Field.

He'll perform all these tasks with the flat emotions of an efficiency expert, with a strict, ever-roaming eye constantly assessing performance versus the bottom line, and is considered the perfect complement to the two other men, decidedly older, running this all-in-the family business — his dad, Fred, the chairman of the board, who's been a Mets owner since 1980, and uncle Saul Katz, the team president who married Fred's sister, Iris, and along with Fred co-founded the real estate firm of Sterling Equities that made them both very rich.

If Fred is the warm and fuzzy yet remote visionary, the charming idealist who dreams the big dreams, and Katz is the financial genius who's so distantly behind the scenes you couldn't pluck him out in a police lineup with even two guesses, then Jeff, the chief operating officer, is the hands-on, Type-A front man coldly executing the master plan, the unsmiling baby bull charging through to the end, no matter what, to close the deal, all the while keeping everybody firmly in line and making certain everything is running smoothly, on schedule and within budget.

Or else.

"Responsibility and accountability," said Jeff's boyhood next-door neighbor and friend, Richard Browne, now working as a coordinator on the new ballpark, "are (concepts) of great importance to him."

His friends and allies say he's all about the mission of the moment, and it's a good guess that his mission this very moment, whether he admits it publicly or not, is as much about his own vindication as about the Mets winning a world championship, to at last show all those who have flippantly flung insults at him over the years that they're dead wrong about him, that there's far more to Jeff Wilpon than just being the boss' son.

"I'm not in this," he once said without a twitch of doubt, when the world was against him at the beginning, "not to achieve my goal."

From the time he entered our consciousness, circa 2001, Jeff Wilpon, who "politely" declined to be interviewed for this story, appeared to us as nothing but a poster boy of nepotism, thrust by his dad into the Mets' organization despite not having on his resume a sliver of hardball management experience. Combine that with his arrival coinciding with the team's sudden descent into oblivion, eventually straight to the bottom of the National League East, and it made for a situation that was no-win from the get-go, where he might as well as had a "Kick Me!" sign taped on his back.

In fact, it took little time for one local columnist to playfully dub him Paris Wilpon, conjuring an unseemly image of a spoiled, empty-headed dolt running around out of control on nothing but unearned money, whose only claim to fame was being an heir to a family fortune.

It didn't help that whatever suspicions people had about Jeff's substance were made that much worse by the fear and loathing of his out-of-the-gate, rough-edged style. To those within the inner sanctum of Metland, he was seen early on, according to sources and published accounts, as something of a pugnacious punk, someone who'd only remove the silver spoon born in his mouth to rap people over the head with it: snooty, abrasive, impatient, short-tempered, unreasonable and a bully over the powerless, who would go so far as to fire an usher for committing the egregious sin of smoking a cigarette on the job.

One revealing story goes back to 2003, Jeff's first full season as COO. The Mets had just finished playing a series against the Expos in Puerto Rico, and they were returning on the team charter. First, however, they needed to go through security on the tarmac, forced to stand on this long, snaking line. It was taking an eternity, too. Jeff, who had stayed behind while his father flew out a day earlier on a private plane, suddenly showed up, taking his place in the back. But after waiting for just a half-minute, he released this snort of an exasperated sigh, lifted up his luggage with a snap, and simply bolted to the front, passing a string of stunned expressions — and forever-altered perceptions.

"It was like, 'I'm more important than everybody else,'" said one eyewitness.

It's these kinds of ugly first impressions that linger to this day, remaining uncomfortably under the surface.

"I think it was Jeff's lack of experience that made him do some things that rubbed people the wrong way," said one high-level former employee who asked for anonymity. "Overall, I think his intentions were good. He was just trying to get the team going in the right direction. But at times, he didn't come across that way. I think because he's such a highly competitive guy that sometimes it was like he wanted to prove to people that he deserved to be there in that job."

"George Steinbrenner on training wheels," is what the whispers have always said about Jeff, appearing far more like George's boy than Fred's.

"Jeff is regimented, extremely demanding and a perfectionist," Browne said. "He wants to win on the field, he wants to win in business, and he's committed to always being better — that is, at everything, even his golf game. Like last summer, while he was on vacation, he e-mailed me that he hit a 68, which was the first time he had ever broken 70. But what I remember most about that e-mail is that after briefly praising himself for that 68, he wrote — mind you, in the same sentence — about how upset he was for the two shots he blew that would've given him a 66. I mean, he couldn't be happy with himself for more than a split second."

Because he's such a workaholic, said the Mets' longtime head of media relations, Jay Horwitz, "he respects people who work hard. If you work hard and do your job, there are no problems."

And Horwitz, who's often Jeff's first call of the morning, knows first-hand the consequences of not doing things right.

"I'm not going to lie, he's yelled at me through the years," he admitted. "If I screw up, he tells me. I remember one time he got on me for showing up 10 minutes late for our nine o'clock meeting. But by the next day, he forgets."

Those who work most closely with him will tell you unequivocally that for good or bad, "You always know where you stand with Jeff," and they'll also tell you, just as unequivocally, you'll know where he stands as well, strong opinions and all.

"Jeff does not impose his will on us," Howard said, "but he will challenge us."

And "if you have an opinion that differs from his," added Browne, "he'll let you run with your plan, but understand you better be right."

But like those frozen berries he munches on, Jeff has apparently thawed over the years, softened a piece at a time into the comfort of his own skin.

"He's changed," Horwitz claimed. "He's mellowed."

"I'll say this," said one employee, "when the Mets were going through their collapse in those last couple of weeks, Jeff not only didn't show any strain but still took the time to come up to me, pat me on the back, tell me I was doing a good job and even asked about my family."

This is not to say, of course, that Jeff Wilpon has magically transformed, but maybe, just maybe, he's evolved a few degrees from those initial Met years, when he was someone so shockingly devoid of social skills that people around him couldn't believe he was related to the regal man who brought him into being.

When you look at the father and son, you quickly see the striking physical resemblance smack in the middle of their faces: that long, thin, upturned nose. But that's where any kind of similarity seems to begin and end. While Fred's lips curl easily into an engaging smile, Jeff's don't, only occasionally managing something akin to a forced grin. While Fred's eyes twinkle, Jeff's barely blink, looking all business, caught in deep thought while possibly pondering the next thing on his agenda. And while Fred exudes a polished elegance and fatherly warmth, as well as being someone famously judicious with his words, Jeff appears raw, impulsive and a bit on the chilly side.

"Jeff doesn't dwell on the emotions (of the job)," said Howard. Like with e-mails — "He prefers getting shorter ones," he said, "and he doesn't like to get the gratuitous, 'OK, thanks,' type of responses. He prefers just, 'Got it. Done.' And that's the end of the chain."

And like with the baseball season — "Jeff maintains an even-keel approach. He feels that since the season is a marathon, you can't get too high or too low," while Howard maintained that the "intensity with which Fred watches Mets games is astounding to me. He lives and dies with every game."

Another employee, explaining one huge difference between the Wilpons, said: "Fred has a way of looking you straight in the eyes, putting his arm around your shoulder, and taking you totally in, as if you're the most important person in the room. Jeff talks to you most of the time as if he's ready to rush off to someplace else."

Unlike Jeff, his father, 71, is a self-made millionaire, growing up the son of an undertaker in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. As a kid, Fred loved his Dodgers to no end, went to Ebbets Field around 20 times every season, and worshipped guys like Gil Hodges and Jackie Robinson and Carl Erskine. In fact, at Lafayette High School, while he was his team's ace pitcher and superstar, a teammate named Sandy Koufax was his weak-hitting first baseman.

In 1971, he became the chairman of Sterling Equities, while Katz took the title of president, and six others, including Fred's younger brother, Richard, were made partners.

Fred established himself as a minority owner of the Mets in January of 1980, buying a 5 percent stake of the organization. But in November of 1986, just a month after the team had won a World Series through the legs of Bill Buckner, he assumed co-ownership with Nelson Doubleday, a blunt man from a publishing dynasty with whom he ultimately had a contentious relationship for years. The two couldn't be more different, disagreed on virtually everything — hirings, firings, trades, free-agent signings and especially the construction of a new stadium that would be a shrine to Ebbets — and came to despise each other so much that they not only stopped talking to one another but sat at Shea in places far enough apart to even avoid eye contact.

Things only worsened between them when Fred brought Jeff into the Mets' fold, having his son do things like run the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones and negotiate the terms of the lease for the team's spring-training site in Port St. Lucie.

Doubleday developed an instant dislike for the kid, thought he was an arrogant little twit and resented his growing role within the organization. In fact, the only times Doubleday would break his silence with the senior Wilpon was when he phoned him complaining about a perceived Jeff transgression. After Fred finally bought Doubleday out in August of 2002, whereupon Jeff was immediately named COO, Doubleday couldn't resist a parting shot, telling one reporter: "Jeff Wilpon said he's going to learn how to run a baseball team and take over at the end of the year. Run for the hills, boys. I think probably all those baseball people will bail."

Jeffrey S. Wilpon was raised in old-money country, Roslyn, Long Island, the oldest of Fred and Judith's three children. With his brother, Bruce, and sister, Robin, the trio form a new generation of power elite. Bruce, who joined Sterling in 2007 and is currently its assets manager, is married to Yuki Oshima, the daughter of a billionaire Korean-Japanese financier; Robin is married to Philip Wachtler, founder and principal of Wachtler Knopf Equities and the son of former New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler.

Jeff, who along with one of the sons of public-relations heavyweight and George Steinbrenner's official mouthpiece, Howard Rubenstein, established an 18-member breakfast club for junior moguls in the late 1990s nicknamed the "S.O.B.s" — or Sons of Bosses, which included such notables as William Rudin, who comes from a prominent real-estate family, and Jonathan Tisch, chairman and CEO of the Loews Corporation and son of Loews founder Robert Tisch.

"We're all friends," Jeff was quoted as saying in 1998. "We do business. We socialize. I help them. They help me. It all runs together."

By 10, Jeff was already carrying around homemade business cards identifying himself as Sterling Equities' "Director of Construction." It was around 15 years later, in 1986, that his dad made him the company's executive vice president — but not before Fred made his son pay his dues with another builder and three years after, as a catcher, Jeff had an eye-blink of a fling at professional baseball, drafted by the Expos (which, rumor has it, was done as a favor to Fred) and spending a brief time with Class-A Jamestown of the New York-Penn League (though his name reportedly doesn't appear in the team's statistics for that season).

What Jeff did last September, especially, was nothing like his dad but straight out of the George Steinbrenner playbook.

Not only did he lower the boom at the worst of times — telling SI.com in the midst of his team balancing perilously on the tipping point: "I'm disappointed with the way the team is performing overall, and that's everyone, top to bottom. I'm disappointed in Omar (Minaya, the general manager), Willie (Randolph), the players ... that's everyone. We shouldn't be in this position," — but once the season ended, reminiscent of Steinbrenner's apology to New York City after the Yankees tanked in the 1981 World Series to the Dodgers, Jeff fired off a letter via e-mail to all Mets season-ticket holders, expressing bitter disappointment over what had happened, conceding they, the fans, indeed deserved much better and promising to fix whatever was wrong.

That attempt at a fix came just days before spring training — in the form of, arguably, the best pitcher in the game, Johan Santana — and Jeff did it exactly the way the Boss in his heyday used to: by first trading away a slew of prospects, then closing the deal with a man-to-man chat and flipping open that fat checkbook of his.

This is the new reality in Metland. It is Win Now time, more than ever, the way it has always been across the river with Steinbrenner's Yankees, from George down to Hank. And despite the absence of an urgent release to the media making the grand announcement, make no mistake: this is Jeff Wilpon's team now — with his training wheels yanked right off.

To know this, you only had to be there at Santana's unveiling at Shea, to see the location of the two Wilpons inside the Diamond Club press conference: Jeff seated within the bright lights of the front row, next to Willie Randolph and right in front of the podium; Fred, all alone, standing in the back of the room amid the darkness, arms folded across his chest — yet smiling proudly.

Indeed, whether we like it or not, the beginning of the Jeff Wilpon era in Mets' history is upon us, and by next season it'll have the official stamp of the games being played in The Stadium That Fred Dreamed But Jeff Built.

Whether we approve of his methods, whether we like him as a person, whether we admire or loathe him or feel somewhere in between, it doesn't matter.

So, he isn't touchy-feely and, OK, he yells sometimes when he doesn't get his way and, granted, he isn't nearly as charming as his dad.

You cannot argue that, within the window of just five full seasons, the junior Wilpon, ducking and darting the slings of criticism every step of the way, has helped drag this franchise up from the pits and deliver a team that demands respect year after year, whose attendance keeps rising by the season, with its own TV network and, soon, a paradigm shift of a ballpark, and which appears strong enough right now of winning it all for the first time in more than two decades.

It would seem that the "goal" he once vowed to complete, with doubters laughing at him from all sides, has all but reached a perfect conclusion for him.

Except "¦

"Jeff is the kind of guy that once he wins the World Series, he'll only be happy for a very short time," said Browne, who knows the man for over 40 years, who always saw the overachieving adult inside that intense whirlwind of a boy. "He'll celebrate for maybe a day or two, and then, well, he's off to the next mission."